A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret. Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim as she freely uses her beauty and charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret; once they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang Dynasty China. A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behavior will out them both, in a sparkling, affluent city where everything runs like clockwork and any deviation from the norm is automatically suspect. Razor-sharp, hilarious, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Reimagining the Chinese folktale “The Legend of the White Snake,” this is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free. 

For readers of Claire-Louise Bennett, Gwendoline Riley, and Rachel Cusk, a modern Gothic in which a woman newly arrived to a vast estate finds herself besieged by mysterious letters, resonant silences, and the uncanny persistence of history. At first Emil and I did not know about the big house. Or if we knew about it, we did not think about it, hidden as it was from Westermoy. It was impossible to get an unbroken view of any part of the building, not left to right, not up or down. Sane, not sane, houses such as this one held gravity differently than other buildings. A woman and her partner arrive at a gameskeeper’s cottage deep in the woods to begin a new life. There, they will undertake an ambitious regenerative agriculture project on behalf of the estate—observing mosses and lichens, planting birch and aspen trees, developing plans to reclaim polluted soils. They learn that soon they will also have their first child. But even from the first happy evening of their arrival, there are spaces where the woman does not like to tread: an anteroom she passes as quickly as she can, a corner in the raised beds where nothing grows, a glasshouse where she invariably feels watched. Then Emil is called away on business, and letters begin to arrive—strange intimations about the estate, thickets of claim and counterclaim. They came to Westermoy to get out ahead of their panic, to try to live a “good life”—to focus on what was in front of them, work with their hands, water and mulch. But neither the garden walls nor the boundaries of the estate can contain what has already taken root. The future they are building must also, unavoidably, rest on the past. A novel of thresholds, secrets, and silences, Poor Baby asks what is left of the world to inherit, and whether it is possible to live ethically within a system one wishes to disavow. It marks the US debut of a major voice in fiction: precise, intelligent, and bracingly new.

A fierce, beautiful novel of survival, faith, and love—following a young boy raised in an isolated matriarchal society. Bodie is a shy, sweet, curious boy who grows up in the Veil, cared for by his many mothers and devoted to his female God. He spends his days playing in the forest and fulfilling his various responsibilities, which include educating the younger children on the history of their world. Increasingly, he begins to love his closest friend, a boy named Aster, in a way he doesn’t understand but knows is infeasible in the Veil. When Bodie is told that he will undergo fulfillment—a mysterious act which signals his conversion to adulthood—he grows apprehensive. Soon, everything in his world shifts, and a darker truth begins to emerge. To save himself, and those he loves most, he may have to do the one thing that is truly forbidden. . . .

From the award-winning author of Pink Slime comes a hypnotic novel of rage, solitude, and metamorphosis, set on a mountain where the living and the dead refuse to stay silent. Winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize A woman lives alone on the slope of a mist-covered mountain, hired by a man she has never seen to patrol the boundary between the cloud forest and the quarry that is slowly devouring it. In her notebooks, she records her solitary days, her fierce desires, the language of her landscape, and the violence that shaped her childhood. One day, a body appears in her yard. And then another, and another. As the dead repeat their silent message, the woman finds in the act of tending to their remains an answer that escaped her among the living, and she begins to form an intimate bond with the mountain that shelters her, mirrors her, and demands to be heard. At once earthy and visionary, tender and ferocious, The Mountain Woman is a novel about the violences women inherit and the forms of life that persist in the ruins. In prose of rare intensity, Fernanda Trías gives voice to a world beyond the human, where care can be an act of rebellion and language must be broken open to tell the story of the harm we do to ourselves, others, and the world we love.

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. The bloody messes don't bother her, not when she's already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer whispered two words: bat eater. Months pass, the killer is never caught, and Cora can barely keep herself together. She pushes away all feelings, disregards the bite marks that appear on her coffee table, and won't take her aunt's advice to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. Cora tries to ignore the rising dread in her stomach, even when she and her weird co-workers begin finding bat carcasses at their crime scene clean-ups. But Cora can't ignore the fact that all their recent clean-ups have been the bodies of East Asian women. Soon Cora will learn: you can't just ignore hungry ghosts.